Nurse With Wound
Homotopy to Marie

"Homotopy to Marie", released in 1982, is the fifth album in the Nurse with Wound saga.

For the first time in his career, Steven Stapleton decides to do everything alone, foregoing the contributions that were necessary in previous albums: Stapleton likes to describe "Homotopy to Marie" as his true debut.

Nurse with Wound, it cannot be emphasized enough, is one of the most monstrous entities in the history of music. "Homotopy to Marie", however, is not to be considered among the most extreme NWW-branded albums. This doesn't mean that, even in a less harsh and chaotic form, Stapleton's offering loses nothing of its absolute "unlistenability".

The first passages of the opener "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" are there to prove it: dry sampled sounds (of a hoe sinking into the ground?) that have nothing musical except the rhythmic cadence. Moans and noises grow in the background, just to emphasize Stapleton's assemblage philosophy, aiming to put together the unthinkable without any pretense of comprehension by the human ear. Meanwhile, the ten minutes of shrieking that follow are worthy of a criminal asylum or a torture chamber, or, better yet, of a gym of crazed Japanese fighting each other fiercely (the call to Japan's stern avant-garde tradition is evident).

Four tracks, almost sixty-five minutes.

The title track is a non-musical journey where a female voice flutters in the void, accompanied only by the crash of a gong; "Astral Durbin Dirge", instead, is a noise collage that showcases Stapleton's exquisite flair in tape manipulation. The concluding "The Schurmz (Unsullied by Sucking)" is a twenty-five-minute monument where sacred and profane flirt in a daring exercise of cut-up reminiscent of certain works by Zappa or Residents.

In algebraic topology, homotopy designates the existence of a continuous deformation between two subspaces R and S of a topological space T that transforms R into S and vice versa. It is not surprising, then, that "Homotopy to Marie", in full coherence with the title, is a deformed work, in continuous motion, where improvisations, free experiments, and the most distinctly dadaist attitude of the English artist dominate: the intricate and complex architectures well known in the NWW realm here give way to extensive spaces of exhaustive nonsense landscapes, incredible vacuums, surreal and haunting expanses not infrequently shaken by seismic shocks capable of startling the dead with fright.

It is inevitable that the soundscapes of the early albums of Current 93, in which Stapleton himself would soon become an architect along with the luciferous David Tibet ("Nature Unveiled" would be released two years later, in 1984), come to mind. 

But the alienation brought by NWW's music has little to do with the dark mysticism skillfully sought by C93: infused with an insane irony and an enviable taste for mockery, the music of NWW aligns more closely with the boldest contexts of avant-garde tout-court, at a time when industrial was still a noble genre, the advanced position of the most genuinely experimental music.

The autism of an artist like Stapleton, like few others committed to an art that makes incommunicability and intransigence its cardinal principles, is the true destabilizing factor of his music. The reasons for such an absurd and intelligible artistic form as this are not to be found in the methods and modalities of artistic creation but much further upstream: in the perceptual processes and categories of thought from which such a worldview and concept of reality emerge.

To understand: imagine that your dog is given the gift of speech for once and you could ask it to express its impressions of the world: what the poor dog would tell you about the world, a world seen from a dog's perspective, seen with dog's eyes, heard with dog's ears and nose, processed with a dog's mental categories, all this would not be less human than what you will listen to in this album.

Woof!